And his literary aesthetic intersected enough with mine, I guess . . . although, in my view, he definitely could have stood to have been a bit more of an Anglophile, and although he did say, when taking a first gander at my home library, “We have the same books, although you sure have a lot more Martin Amis. Is everything OK?” So many conversations you have with people about books are so solemnly literary, but with David there was never any arrogance, never any pretentiousness. He never held forth; he was humble, he was modest . . . but no . . . that wasn’t right. David wasn’t humble. He wasn’t modest at all. He had the arrogance of one who could afford to be modest.
Questions: If you “act” humility, what difference does it make that you aren’t really actually humble? Maybe the appearance of humility is actually as good as humility itself?
David was finishing the manuscript for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men that summer and said he was trying to work on a novel, too. My impression then was that the novel had something to do with the porn industry. He was auditing a math class for novel research (but a math class related to the porn industry how exactly?); the course was once described to me as statistics and another time described as accounting. He’d leave his house mostly to go to AA meetings, he said. Drone’s situation was stable, though probably not for long. I knew all about the heartache of loving a dog. As a child, I’d always dreaded the idea of turning eighteen, because our dog would be fourteen then. David said he’d always done the same thing—calculate the year of his future sorrow.
“I think I’ve found my twin,” he said.
He sent pictures of his dogs and his house—“just so you can see what you’re getting into.” The house was a real “Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, where are you when we need you?”–type situation: “It’s beyond all hope,” I said. “Torch everything and start over.” (And was that really duct tape holding his atrocious sofa together?) The truth: he had no visual sense whatsoever.
A call from David at work: “What’s the definition of ‘bivouac’? I was having an argument with someone about this.”
Wasn’t a bivouac like a tent or something? (And why the hell was he asking me?)
“Can you use it in a sentence please?”
Well now. He was testing me, I guess. I wasn’t going to give him some plodding old declarative sentence (“the boy pitched his bivouac”) or an unbeauteous something or other. I love the great poet James Tate—always have, always will—and his delightful poem “In My Own Backyard” was the first time I’d experienced “bivouac” not in its stolid noun form but, enchantingly, as a verb. I remembered that part of the poem, which I’d read in college. I showed off a little and recited for David: the sky and daisies, “bivouacked between worlds.”
“The most intelligent man in the world would not know that,” said David.
Flan, meet thumbtack. Whipped cream concealing swords. Everything was barbed, spiky with qualifications.
I think about this one a lot: The most intelligent man in the world would not know that. He’d said something similar to me before, when we were watching a talk show on TV. I’d made the comment about how, as unlikely as it seems, there was something slightly off with the proportionality of Gwyneth Paltrow’s outfit (and I say this as G.P.’s biggest fan). “Wow,” he said gallantly. “The smartest man in the world wouldn’t notice that.”
Another call:
“What female writers should I be reading?”
“Nice question, David.”
“Was that sexist of me?”
“Yes,” I said. “That was very sexist of you.”
He did ten minutes on Cynthia Ozick and I did ten seconds on the somewhat obscure modernist poet Laura Riding, later known as Laura (Riding) Jackson, a crowd-pleaser whom David said he’d never heard of. I was then reading—or trying to read; she’s a tough one—Riding’s book Progress of Stories, and I attempted to explain to David her renunciation of poetry theory, which was exactly how it sounded: Riding, an abstruse yet highly original poet, associated with the Fugitives and Allen Tate and a major influence on her paramour, Robert Graves (particularly on his classic book about Greek mythology and poetic inspiration, The White Goddess), withdrew from poetry when she was in her thirties. Riding’s framework for making sense of the world: toppled. The question to which I kept returning: How much can you give up and still be “you”?
“But do you know why I really called?” David asked.
“No,” I said. Although I did.
“I needed an excuse to talk to you.”
Why couldn’t we just go to each other? Why did we still need pretexts?
That night, I believed that my apartment had been broken into (it had not: at fault was a complex set of misunderstandings involving my rabbit, my dry-cleaning delivery, and a loose doorknob screw). Not that David could exactly do anything about it from Illinois, but he was the person I wanted to talk to. David was always the person I wanted to talk to, then.
“You are clearly too freaked out to be at home right now,” he said. “Do you have a friend you can stay with tonight?”
I did.
“Call me as soon as you get there, do you understand? I worry about you,” he said. “We’re the same, me and you.”
How so? (And I always loved it when David would go all ungrammatical.)
“Our brains are our own worst enemies.”
This was also a choice Wallace move: we shared genetic material, we were twins—no, even better, we were the same person. “I think I like your hair so much because it’s just like mine,” he said. “We even look alike.” It was an irresistible mistake to make, thinking you and David were identical—but then when you got to know David better, you’d think, Man, I am nothing like you at all. At certain later points, if he’d told me he was literally a Martian and had been delivered to Earth via flying saucer, I would have nodded serenely and said, “Of course. It all makes sense now.”
“And how is my brain my worst enemy?” I asked.
“You know,” David said, “it’s always so interesting talking to you because we use similar conversational tactics. Like me, you tend to deflect attention from yourself by asking a lot of questions. It’s a way of controlling the conversation and a way of managing someone else’s perception of you. It’s also extremely manipulative. We’re manipulative in pretty much identical ways, I think. I suppose I don’t have to tell you this.”
I didn’t consider myself particularly manipulative, but David had a fixed perception of me already—a projection that may or may not have been connected to reality.
A couple of days later, I heard an unappealing story about David from a female acquaintance. I believed that this woman had taken a brief, intense interest in me because she’d seen “Adult World” in Esquire and had surmised that I’d been the editor for it. We went to dinner.
“Has David tried anything with you?” she asked. “You seem like the type of person he’d have a crush on.”
David had a type? From what I now understood about him, his only “type” seemed to be female and, sorry to say, without power.
I took my usual mum’s-the-word approach to him, but this woman seemed to need to talk—so I listened. I hoped that her story (another thwarted getting-laid attempt on David’s part) wasn’t true (I sensed that it was), and I hoped that David wasn’t that much of a loser and a creep. Could he really have been that unutterably lame?
When I returned home from the dinner, I felt compelled to run her account by David for his take.
“Not true,” he said. “Totally false.” And he added an unconvincing “I ever see her again, I’m going to say, ‘Girlfriend, what’chu talkin’ ’bout?’”
A few hours later, David woke me up with a late-night phone call: “Sweetie, it’s possible that I may have lied to you. What you heard earlier about me is maybe seventy-five percent true.”
Silence on both ends.
“OK, more like . . . eighty percent,” he said, folding up like a rusty lawn chair. �
��Are you mad at me?”
I wasn’t, but I should have been. He’d lied to me.
I asked him now if this woman knew anything about the really horrific thing he told me about the day we met—the worst thing he’d ever done.
“Seriously?” he said sharply. “Do you think I would tell her about that? Who else do you think I talk to like this?” He paused. “Is it actually possible that you really know me so little?”
But I was learning that you would never get the whole truth and nothing but the truth from David; his truth was always on somewhat of a sliding scale. You could be getting 20 percent, you could be getting 80—but you could be sure that the stories you heard from him were never completely told. What you had to do was learn to navigate within all those gambits and dodges, those omissions and erasures.
How could someone who seemed, in many ways, such an open book also be so sneaky and furtive? The more he’d say, the more you’d notice that things didn’t quite fit together, that there were versions of stories behind versions behind versions—and some of these versions were self-contradictory. I asked him once why, in his essay about tennis, tornadoes, and math, he had fibbed about the name of the town he was from. He wrote that he was from something called Philo, Illinois, but of course he was a faculty brat from Urbana. What did this little obfuscation even get him? Why did he always feel the need to throw everyone off his trail?
“Oh, you know me,” David said. “I always have to wear my Groucho glasses.”
Yes, it was always performance art, in a way. I understood that. I was a fan of the theatrical approach to life, too—when you’re from northeast Ohio, you understand that you must invent whatever you have, because that was all you got. But there were a couple of problems with living in the theater, the first exemplified by these lines from the Yeats poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
The second problem: you create the theater that undoes you.
19
At my high school, during gym classes or extracurricular sports games, students would cheer “Conducive!” when the team scored a point. The emphasis was on the second syllable, like this: “CON-DU-CIVE!” Everyone seemed to think that “conducive” (which surely has to be the worst cheer word ever) meant, approximately, “awesome.” It’s safe to say that I didn’t really like my high school much. I didn’t seem to find meaning in the things the other kids there found meaningful. I didn’t seem to worry about the same things they worried about. Essentially, I guess you could say that we didn’t live in the same theater.
“Who is oppressing you?” I once furiously wrote in my Spanish workbook, as I took an aggrieved gander at the classroom situation before me. The answer: the students were oppressing themselves. I’d always had this idea that people were pickled in some vague notion they believed the world had of them. The truth: the world does not care. So just be who you are. Simple as that, yes? Yes.
Fortunately, in high school I had a best friend, Michelle. We were both self-righteous teetotalers and, conveniently, we both found the same individuals and situations ludicrous. In classes, we would write each other these endlessly long, grotesquely self-aggrandizing letters, exchanged like throbbing hand grenades in the school hallway. In these letters, I regret to report that one of us once referred to our fellow students as “luminously dull”; the other one once referred to these persons as “mental cotton candy.” We were intolerable.
Toward the end of our high school careers, Michelle and I did everything we could to spend as little time as possible at school or in our town. Our town wasn’t much to write home about, really (that was our belief at the time; now I see that we missed a lot—or at least I did): there was a drive-in A&W, a real hot spot in town, as if eating French fries in your car and getting ketchup all over the place were some sort of prize; there was a Bob’s Big Boy with a big dumb mascot that would inevitably come up missing whenever the high school won a football game, not when they lost. With these other kids, their lives seemed right there. Their worries seemed right there. Michelle and I, we wanted something else entirely—but what?
Our parental hand-me-down vehicles became A-to-B devices whose principal function was to spirit us away, on Friday nights (and occasional Saturdays), to the Cleveland area and back. The first stop on our northerly journey: a Saks Fifth Avenue, where we’d stalk around and jabber about how we wished we could buy this or that. The second stop: a coffee shop in Cleveland Heights called Arabica, where we’d engage in some serious people watching. These drives took about an hour each way, and during them Michelle and I would listen to the Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus (Andrew Eldritch and Peter Murphy, I will love you always) or maybe the Elvis Costello album Spike, which we found too dense, too busy, although we did both enjoy the little dig at Andrew Lloyd Webber in one of the songs. But mostly we’d recite lines from the Martin Amis novels London Fields (“You don’t need much empathic talent to tell what Keith’s thinking. He doesn’t do that much thinking in the first place”) and Money (“I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police”). It seemed to me then that very few writers were able to use the English language to greater effect than Amis (and, of course, my beloved Anthony Burgess). It’s now of interest to me that Michelle and I were both possessors of such a rigid, particularist aesthetic and that that aesthetic was unfortified by anything resembling actual information. Is there wisdom without knowledge? We were also untroubled by the self-evident fact that we were interested only in art by men, art whose intended audience was also, probably, men.
Yes, it was troubling to me that the writers I loved also didn’t seem to have all that much interest in female characters. I didn’t know how fraught I should have been about that. Should novels be evaluated morally? Only aesthetically? Both? My struggle with this matter was but in its nascent phase.
NOW, MY SENSITIVITY ABOUT THE WAYS IN WHICH MALE WRITERS REPRESENTED female characters—or, in the case of male journalists who wrote for men’s magazines, how they represented actual women—was ever increasing. It was a very complex matter to deal with, because I also felt that I shouldn’t really be reading ideologically—how could I possibly do my job if I did? How could I possibly work at a men’s magazine if I went around applying what might be called a postcritical analysis to everything? I ought to read aesthetically, not morally, yes? It was not my job to be a censor. But I also knew that I needed the women in what I read to be as clever and as dumb, as noble and as wicked, as any man. Was this asking too much of our literature?
I posed this question to David.
“Have I got the piece for you,” he said.
He’d been thinking a lot about misogyny in fiction, he said, and had recently written a review of a John Updike novel for the New York Observer addressing this very topic. He’d send it to me.
That sounded super. Super duper. I’d look forward to getting the piece. I was, I mentioned to him, reading Infinite Jest again, and I had some things to say about his own female characters.
“Oh, God,” said David.
Briefly, very briefly, very lightly, I asked whether he didn’t feel that the two principal female characters in Infinite Jest (there are very few others)—Madame Psychosis (aka Joelle Van Dyne, the P.G.O.A.T.: Prettiest Girl of All Time) and the evil matriarch Avril Incandenza—were not hypersexualized and perhaps grotesquely objectified? Indeed, Madame Psychosis is such a figure of male fantasy, so beautiful (so deformed?), that she keeps her face hidden behind a veil, and Avril—sexually promiscuous, twisted, generally out of her freaking gourd—is certainly one of the most stupendously awful mothers in the history of American literature.
“I don’t even disagree with you,” David said. “I’m trying to do better.”
He said he was thinking a lot about misogyny in his own writing, too, and that in the manuscript he was working on (still Brief Interviews), he was trying to deal wi
th his sexism.
Sounded good to me. My preference was for him to deal with his sexism himself so I wouldn’t have to.
He would also send me a copy of his first novel, The Broom of the System, he said (and did), which, he suggested, had a female protagonist who might be more up my alley. But then he warned that the novel wasn’t very good.
“That’s what happens when you’re a reasonably intelligent college student trying to rewrite The Crying of Lot 49,” he added. (Hilariously, David, in interviews, would deny any Pynchon influence on his work.)
And I wasn’t sure if The Broom of the System was any good, but at least I was certain that the central female character, a young woman worried that she may exist not as a living person but only as a creation in a story, was David in drag. He also said he wanted points for setting the book in (a surreal version of) northeast Ohio. He’d even name-checked my humble little town, Tallmadge. “It was as if I were conjuring you,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I must have been.”
An envelope arrived in the mail with a caveat he’d written on the back: “WARNING—TOXIC UPDIKE MATERIALS ENCLOSED—Read at Risk.” Inside was an essay, that essay, a printout from DFW HQ of “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One” (later retitled “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”), David’s boisterously pious evisceration of the Updike swan-song novel Toward the End of Time and the Great Male Narcissists of the Updike generation. Thanks, David, by the way, for introducing that useful term in the essay: the Great Male Narcissists, the postwar trio of writers—Updike, Roth, and Mailer—whom he characterized by their solipsism, their machismo, and their swinish attitudes toward women. They were all still in the world then, the GMNs—and Wallace, too—all of them gone now, gone where the goblins go.
In the Land of Men Page 22